Forced to Marry My Late Mother's Husband

He was her stepfather. He made her breakfast every Sunday while her mother was still alive. He was at her graduation. He kept a careful distance that Aurora noticed — and never examined. When her mother died, Aurora left and spent two years telling herself she had processed everything properly. She had not. Now her grandmother has handed her a red envelope with one name inside it. The same name. Aurora holds the note for a long time before she gets on the bus. Julian Oswald is forty years old. Cedar Falls knows him as a quiet widowed chef raising his daughter alone. What Cedar Falls does not know — what the entire culinary world has been trying to discover for years — is that Julian is the Ghost Chef. The anonymous billionaire behind the world's largest culinary empire. A face no one has ever photographed. His five-year-old daughter Lily has not spoken a full sentence since her mother died. She has not eaten voluntarily. Not for anyone. Until Aurora walks through the door. Lily says one word after two years of silence — a name she should not still remember — and Julian goes completely still on the porch. That is when Aurora understands she is not walking into a contract. She is walking back into the most dangerous kitchen she has ever been in. The one where everything between them has always been unspoken. The one where he still knows her breakfast order without asking. He was supposed to be off-limits. He was. He memorized her breakfast order anyway.